Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Germany. He spent
1788-1793 as a theology student in nearby Tübingen, where he developed
close friendships with students there, including the great romantic poet
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) and the philosopher Friedrich W.J.
von Schelling (1775-1854). Until around 1800, Hegel was devoted to developing
ideas on religious and social themes. He apparently saw himself as an
educational reformer, hoping to follow in the footsteps of Lessing and
Schiller, both important figures in the German Enlightenment.

Around 1800, however, like his school friends Hölderlin
and Schelling, his ideas turned to issues in the “critical”
philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804).
In 1801 Hegel moved to the University of Jena, by then a major center
in the Romantic Movement and in Kantian philosophy. In 1801 he published
his first philosophical work, The Difference between Fichte’s
and Schelling’s System of Philosophy, which labeled him as
a follower of Schelling. Subsequent works, however, would establish Hegel
as a genius in his own right.

In 1806 Hegel completed his first major work, the Phenomenology
of Spirit, which showed a departure from his early Schellingian work.
His university career interrupted by the Napoleonic Wars, Hegel worked
for a newspaper in Bamberg and later as the headmaster and philosophy
teacher at a Gymnasium in Nuremburg, during which time he married
and had children and also published his Science of Logic. In
1816 he was appointed to a chair in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg,
and in 1818 took the prestigious chair of philosophy at the University
of Berlin. This was the most prestigious position in the German philosophical
world.

In 1821, in Berlin, Hegel published his major work in
political philosophy, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, which
was based on lectures given at Heidelberg and on his section of the Philosophy
of Spirit dealing with “objective spirit.” During the
following ten years up to his death in 1831, Hegel enjoyed great celebrity
at Berlin.

Hegel had been a supporter of progressive and non-revolutionary
politics, but his followers split into two factions, “left-wing”
and “right-wing.” Out of the left came Karl Marx, who had
been a student of Hegels at Berlin and a member of the philosophical circle
known as the "Young Hegelians." Marx, however, ultimately rejected
Hegel's "idealist" approach approach to philosophy in favor
of a "materialistic" or practical view. It is this redefinition
of Hegelian philosophy that formed the basis for the Marxist approach
to history based on dialectical
materialism.

Subsequent criticisms of Hegelian philosophy, including
that of his former friend Schelling, influenced later movements, including
existentialism and precursors to the post-modern movement.

"Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion."

"But even as we contemplate history as this slaughter bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, our thoughts cannot avoid the question, for whom, for what final aim. these monstrous sacrifices have been made. "